Just out of the blue my eye was caught by an article by Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) on literary criticism by Anita Sarkeesian (@femfreq) of The Hunger Games (a trilogy of books by author Suzanne Collins, @_SuzanneCollins, which have partly and will be fully rendered into movies). Cathy Young's article is well-written, and presents many worthy points, but I would like to add some points of my own to all this, and there are certain themes that need to be drawn out of the subject - a subject I have...

Slavoj Žižek misunderstands freedom and control. He doesn't get George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). Why is that, and why is it important, and what does it say about us all? Žižek (you can just call him Zizek) is one smart guy; he's a philosopher and culture critic who has quite often written on theological issues. He's quite famous these days (VICE magazine calls him a superstar), and he's proud of thinking dangerous ideas. We as a public need to be confronted with dangerous ideas, we need...

Astrophysics, what use is it? The stars are far away, and as Cassius in Shakespeare's play says, the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings. You could add the fault is in ourselves, not in our stars, when we are ignorant, or simply stupid. Put all that in a different way: when I was a teenager, working in cruddy factories and on worse building-sites, reading a book was seen socially as a bad thing, akin to Communism or being gay. Reading a book was a major no-no. Oddly...

There is a video that hit the news. Supposedly a selfie video, one taken by a woman of herself while practicing twerking, it shows her being knocked over onto a table where her yoga-pants catch fire from a candle. Hundreds of TV news shows in the USA went hogwild over the video as a massive #TwerkFAIL. It fed right into a complex many have of wanting to laugh at others, of feeling superior - and of commerce being only too willing to sell you what you want, not what you need. Schadenfreude, not just...

There are details as breaking news right at this minute of the crime at Woolwich, London, in in which two attacked a victim with knife and cleaver. My last blog post was about a series of tweets from a person who was an eyewitness at the Woolwich crime scene; this blog post is about the news just breaking now, and also the already-known video footage obtained by British Channel 4 News, as well as some questions of reporting ethics.

People aren't usually machines. They make choices. Was James Eagan Holmes * insane, driven by madness? He was born on December 13, 1987; on midnight of July 19 and the early morning of July 20, 2012, he killed 12 people and injured another 59 in a movie theater in Denver, Colorado, at a showing of the latest Batman film, a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises. Was he insane? Let's tackle the difficult part first.

Pacifism is one of those things I admire but do not choose. Is it possible to genuinely admire an ethical choice despite disagreeing with it? This is a question I have often examined myself on, but with no answer as yet. What exactly is the moral argument for pacifism? That too is not so clear. Marty Troyer (@thePeacePastor) has a guest blog post up on the @patheos Pangea blog run by Kurt Willems (@KurtWillems). Both Marty Troyer and Kurt Willems come from the wider Anabaptist branch of Christianity,...

If you haven't yet read all three of the books in the Hunger Games trilogy, you may not want to read this, since it gives away the ending. But if you're interested in how to cope with PTSD, and if you've read the books, then this is for you. I last blogged about the trilogy by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire and Mockingjay, set USA hardcover edition, British paperback edition) and the movie made of the first book in my post here.

The movie The Hunger Games hits the cinemas worldwide around March 22, and should be in cinemas for around 4 weeks or more after that date. It is a film adaptation of the first novel from the trilogy of the same name by Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games Trilogy Box Set, USA hardcover edition, British paperback edition; the other two books in that set are titled Catching Fire and Mockingjay). The trilogy of books, meant for young adults and older children, is in my opinion quite a brilliant bit of...

It strikes me that if postmodernism sometimes becomes the cowardice in the face of the need to stand up for one particular, chosen ethic or idea, then modernism is the cowardice of refusing to acknowledge there are other possible ideas and outcomes. I've blogged before on why postmodernism is not going to go away and die, despite some people's fervent hopes; but then, neither will modernism or premodernism. As to what fashion will come next, that's a good question; detractors of postmodernism hope...

It would be great to see something similar for ethics and philosophy (and for psychiatry/psychology, interfaith including atheism, and all as they involve arts and style). Festivals are often far more suited for public participation than conferences....

There's some interesting debates going on about plans by the USA government to possibly end funding for screening for prostate cancer. Now prostate cancer is common, but usually affects only men over 50 years of age, and won't kill most of them, other things, including old age, killing them first. Roughly two-thirds of cases are very slow-growing cancers, and not worth worrying about at all, but one third are fast-growing and possibly dangerous, though again many will not die of even those. There...

There's an interesting debate between Richard Dawkins and Bill O'Reilly, parts of which are shown in the video below, which also features analysis of some of its highlights by Cenk Kadir Uygur (of the Young Turks program). It does bring to light a couple of points I've long thought about. The first point is personal authenticity. Disregard the dishonest tactics of Bill O'Reilly for a moment, and look at what he's appealing to underneath; he appeals to two or three factors.

Every time I have an idea, I remind myself usually a million people have had the idea before me. This time round, the atheist and philosopher Julian Baggini (@microphilosophy) is working towards a couple of ideas I've already had. But every idea is only worth as much as those who support it, every idea is only as good as the movement it inspires, so let's look at Julian Baggini's ideas. Baggini has realised that the God debate is a boring stalemate, that neither religion nor atheism will be vanquished...

There's a lot of guff uttered over a very loose collection of ideas called postmodernism, and lately there's been a lot of guff uttered in hopes of the oncoming death of postmodernism, whatever it's supposed to be. So what is it really, why are people so worked up about it, and why is its possible death being announced so avidly, and who's doing the death-knelling?

So this should be a bumper crop, owing to too much time elapsing between my last blogs round-up and this one. I'll do what I can here today, but owing to time constraints, I will have to do a Part 2 a little later. Part 2 will be signficantly longer; I have a lot of posts marked for notice.

History of science, science journalism, science, medicine, neuroscience: The Giant's Shoulders blog carnival for September is up. If you try a direct link to the post in question, you get a 404...

You may not have heard of Mark Rife yet, but even if you close down this screen and never come back, you will hear of him. And you can either decide what it should mean for you, or have it decided for you by mere accident of personal history. Mark Rife recently committed suicide just shortly after one thousand days — 1,000 days, which is two and three-quarter years — after the death of his wife, Sarah Ann Rife née Testa, who died August 25, 2008. He waited so long because of a remark his wife had...

In my last blog post, I gave some background to the Methodists in Britain. Now let's start to look at them in-depth. The Methodists started as an underground movement in the Church of England, wanting to reform, revitalize and redirect the CofE, and along the way being very active in campaigns such as prison reform and ending slavery. Owing to their own confusion at times as to direction, and to disapproval and occasional repression from the establishment of the day, they eventually formed their...

The conference Science Online London (#Solo11) was quite an interesting one, for many reasons. On the whole, as I see it, its major strength lies in laying a very good solid base for future Science Online London events. There are some areas that need strengthening. Please keep in mind this is only a short summary; I will be blogging much more in depth on it over the next week.

Taking it all from the beginning: the preceeding TalkFest event of Thursday 01 September (which you can...

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